Our Impact

When The Rules Changed

Throughout our history, the Tepper School’s aim has never been to keep pace with business practice. Rather, we stay ahead of the marketplace via cutting-edge knowledge discovery and a rigorous approach to leadership and analytics.

When our business school first appeared on the management education scene in 1949, the way the game was played changed in an instant. Management science was an academic upstart, and it did not play by the rules.

Bigger schools touted conventional wisdom about how problems were meant to be solved. Back then, the case study method was thought to be “the way.”

But, we didn’t listen.

Esteemed institutions pushed forth their orthodoxy, but were startled when challengers like Simon, Modigliani, Miller, Cooper and other pioneers defied academic tradition, more excited by novel ways of thinking rather than the prominence of other schools’ ivory towers.

So, we kept moving.

And, as the history books now recount, we did, indeed, find the better way: a problem-solving path called management science that had not existed, and one that was a defining direction for management education and industry.

Rankings that have been on the rise for several years and have broken the Top 10.

A global renown for analytics and big data, an arena whose time has come and arrived on our doorstep.

And, one of the most innovative, creative business school entrepreneurship centers in the nation, whose present-day contributions exceed 250 new companies and 9,000 jobs.

Amidst the velocity of results, our vision remains linked to Carnegie Mellon University, the academic conservatory where the hard sciences work alongside the creative arts to produce a workmanship admired (and often replicated) by global peers, lawmakers, researchers and corporate leaders.

Today, we are recognized as among the world’s most innovative business schools, with particular focus on research and teaching in the areas of organizational behavior, finance, entrepreneurship, economics, marketing and operations and operations research.